A recent article about the spread of the Indo European family of languages caused me to wonder about the linguistic capabilities of the first humans to migrate out of Africa. How well developed was the language of those who were first to leave Africa?
I think this depends on if you believe the out of africa model of human expansion or not...if you do, then physically and mentally the humans that spread out of africa would have been just as capable of language as we are. Assuming this to be the case, I dont think its possible to say HOW developed the language used was....you'd also have to think about just what you mean by developed. After all, is the language used in so called modern societies more developed, due to the huge number of words we have to cover all our new technology ( not to mention new social concepts and the like)? At a guess I would say, assuming we ARE going with out of africa, that their language would have covered whatever was required at the time, this being whatever their social system required, along with names of the various things in the world around them. If you look further into the development of languages, you'll find that their complexity is pretty much dependent on the complexity of the culture involved. Again, it comes down to if you believe it was h.sapiens that left africa, and what your definition of developed is. ** for those that dont know it, the out of africa model says that anatomically modern humans left africa somwhere around 150-200kya, rather than some less developed ancestor migrating outwards and THEN developing, eventually into h.sapiens
What article was that? I recently read one that said the language all other human languages developed from was not like any language today, but consisted of a lot of tongue-clicking and other noises that did not involve the vocal cords much.
Really? That sounds a bit like the language the !Kung speak ( the exclamation is a click), you know the tribe the guy in the Gods Must Be Crazy was from? Guess they ARE african and have held to tradition alot....could explain it perhaps?
Sparkle: The article appeared in the NY Times Science section on the 9th or 16th of March 2004. It is probably a summary (or copy) of an article published elsewhere. Every Tuesday, the NY Times has a Science section, which is usually worth reading. The Indo European family is perhaps 5000-10,000 years old. It was originally believed to have been spread via conquest. A culture which developed calvary techniques of warfare came from the Steppes of Russia about the time that Indo European started to spread. It is now believed that it was spread by a culture with very efficient agricultural techniques, resulting in a rapid growth in their population. Being able to produce food very efficiently allowed them to outbreed other cultures. The spread of the language is alleged to match the expansion of an agriculturally based culture. When an expanding family can no longer be supported by their currently farmed acreage. some of the children move on to the next areas suitable for farming. The expansion rate of such a culture matches the rate of spread of the language better than a rate of spread due to conquest. The out of Africa culture was far earlier, and they would have spoken a language ancestral to Indo European. BTW: I (as a teenager) and others independently had a theory that the Basques were descendants of Neanderthals, driven by the expansion of the Indo European culture. The Basque language is not related to any other modern language, making one wonder about their history. This theory was refuted long ago. It is currently believed that there are no Neanderthal genes in the current human gene pool.
Hi, @Dinosaur: well, I don’t know anything about any NY times Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! , and I did not read it in an English publication. Regrettably newspapers are so rare here that people pass them on to friends when they’ve finished reading them. That’s what I did. So I cannot repeat you the original article. However, I remember that scientists have identified, yes, Rebel, the !Kung (South Africa) and the Hadzabe tribe (eastern Africa) as those humans most likely to speak a quite original language. What I could not understand in this article was the way how the scientists try to connect between genome and language. And why? @RebelWithoutACow: here some arguments on how an “Ursprache” could have sounded like. www.ling.umu.se/fonetik2003/pdf/001.pdf The authors also challenge the assumption on a “click”-language as being the oldest. It also comes quite close to answer Dinosaur's thread-opening question.
I do happen to side with the out of africa idea. But regardless I think humans had a language before they were humans. Chimps have a language of sorts, they can and do make sentences comprised of 2 or 3 words that each of their chimp buddies can understand. They also throw in body language and rythmic beats on tree trunks and the ground, being able to communicate with eachother quite well. Our ancestral history has probably had verbal communication for some time. Almost certainly before there was even such a thing as a homonid. The homonid branch probably put more focus on language than did the ape branch. And probably every homonid there has been had a fairly complex language. Not compared to ours today but other land animals. I do subscribe to the idea that homo-sapiens was a single race before it branched out to different races, and I think homo-sapiens spawned in africa. As such I think language was in full swing long before they left africa. They were the animal we are now, we may have redefined language and gave it rules etc etc but we didn't invent it, it is something built into our species.
I've posted this on other threads, but... The most recent linguistic research, using massively parallel multiprocessors to compare languages to an extent never before possible, has reduced human speech to just two language families, and there's no reason to think that a few more years of computing power won't reduce that to one family. It's looking more and more like Homo sapiens had already developed language when they left Africa. In fact, language and the profound change it brought to tribal organizations may have been the single development that made it possible for them to leave the comforts of Africa and adapt to the conditions on every major land mass except Antartica.
